Buster Douglas Upset

Tyson’s shocking loss to Buster Douglas, instead of being viewed as a single catastrophic event, should be viewed as happening along a continuum. At this point in his career, Tyson was skating by on innate ability, not training, partying and giving into a general hedonism. But from Tyson’s view, he was still knocking people out; and so he was lulled perhaps into a false sense of security.

He just met the wrong man on the wrong night with Buster Douglas, but it could have been anybody. The real crisis was Tyson’s lack of commitment to the sport of boxing and to himself as the heavyweight champion. But he still had the courage at least to endeavor to get back what was rightfully his: The respect and the prestige of the heavyweight championship.

Ironically, when Tyson and Don King scheduled Douglas for Tyson’s next bout, they did so because they knew Tyson was slacking. According to Tyson, King thought that Douglas would be a “pushover.” Meanwhile, they were ducking a fight with Razor Ruddock, again, due to Tyson’s lack of training. The rest is history.

When Tyson says he didn’t train for this fight, he means it. By his account in Undisputed Truth, he was 30 pounds overweight at the time he flew into Tokyo, where the fight was set. King offered him a bonus if he could weigh in around his usual weight (217). Tyson weighed in at 220 a day before the fight, but that didn’t make up for his lack of training. He testifies to hitting the gym to spar “once in a while,” and by his own admission, it was clear for anyone to see he was out of shape.

The fight itself was a disaster for Tyson, although he did score a controversial knockdown, which according Tyson’s telling, included a suspiciously slow count for Douglas, allowing him to get up to live another round. Usually the refs would have been in the bag for Tyson as the heavyweight champion and the main draw. Tyson wonders facetiously if maybe Don King forgot to pay off this particular ref.

When Douglas unleashes a flurry of punches on Tyson, Tyson describes a disconnected feeling: He couldn’t feel the punches, he could only hear them. And then he was on the canvas, after which point he had to ask his trainer what happened. It gives one a sense of the otherworldly feeling of getting pummeled in the ring–that one can hardly perform any countervailing action when one’s opponent gains the upper hand so decisively.

After the fight, Don King spoke of lawsuits, referencing the supposedly slow count on the Douglas knock-down. But that was going to be a tough battle to fight after the fact, and based on Tyson’s autobiography, they seemed to have slowly just dropped the issue and moved on. That said, I can remember the controversy, and it did seem as though there were certain irregularities in the fight. Imagine if Tyson hadn’t searched for his mouth guard and had instead just gotten up? But that kind of misses the point, which is that he should not put have put himself in such a position as to be disputing the speed of the ref’s count.

The image of a hapless Tyson searching for his mouthpiece on the canvas as the ref counted him out resonates still. It is a symbol of a fall from greatness; of a bemused man and a comeuppance which inevitably follows hubris–Iron Mike as a tragic hero.

Yet Tyson took his loss to Douglas philosophically:

"Cus always used to tell me that fighting is a metaphor for life. It doesn't matter if you're losing; it's what you do after you lose" (222).  

And indeed, Tyson found new purpose after the Douglas upset. He returned to Catskill and went back into training mode. Tyson’s bodyguard found him doing push-ups the next morning at 7am: “Oh, now you want to train? After the motherfucking fight,” he said to Tyson incredulously. But isn’t that life? We want to relive and redo an event in which we made our worst mistakes and apply effort after the disaster has already occurred. Only after losing everything can we see what we had.

After the Douglas fight, Tyson understandably might have felt a little lost. With his whole identity built around a sense of invincibility, who exactly was Mike Tyson now? But he answered that question in 1990 with a signature first round knockout against Henry Tillman, and Tyson had seemingly regained his confidence, though maybe with a new touch of humility.

Works Cited 

Tyson, Mike. Undisputed Truth. NY: Penguin Group, 2013. 

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